by Gary Keller
Those who do this, in my experience, are the ones who not only become the most accomplished, but who also have the most career opportunities. Slowly but surely they become known in their organization for their ONE Thing and become “irreplaceable.” Ultimately, no one can imagine or tolerate the cost of losing them. (The opposite is equally true, by the way, for those lost in the land of “Everything Else.”)
Once you’ve done your ONE Thing for the day, you can devote the rest of it to everything else. Just use the Focusing Question to identify your next priority and give that task the time it deserves. Repeat this approach until your workday is done. Getting “everything else” done may help you sleep better at night, but it’s unlikely to earn you a promotion.
FIG. 29 Your time-blocking calendar.
Time blocking works on the premise that a calendar records appointments but doesn’t care who those appointments are with. So, when you know your ONE Thing, make an appointment with yourself to tackle it. Every day great salespeople generate leads, great programmers program, and great artists paint. Take any profession or any position and fill in the blank. Great success shows up when time is devoted every day to becoming great.
To achieve extraordinary results and experience greatness, time block these three things in the following order:
Time block your time off.
Time block your ONE Thing.
Time block your planning time.
1. TIME BLOCK YOUR TIME OFF
Extraordinarily successful people launch their year by taking time out to plan their time off. Why? They know they’ll need it and they know they’ll be able to afford it. In truth, the most successful simply see themselves as working between vacations. On the other hand, the least successful don’t reserve time off, because they don’t think they’ll deserve it or be able to afford it. By planning your time off in advance, you are, in effect, managing your work time around your downtime instead of the other way around. You’re also letting everyone else know well in advance when you’ll be out so they can plan accordingly. When you intend to be successful, you start by protecting time to recharge and reward yourself.
Take time off. Block out long weekends and long vacations, then take them. You’ll be more rested, more relaxed, and more productive afterward. Everything needs rest to function better, and you’re no different.
Resting is as important as working. There are a few examples of successful people who violate this, but they are not our role models. They succeed in spite of how they rest and renew—not because of it.
2. TIME BLOCK YOUR ONE THING
After you’ve time blocked your time off, time block your ONE Thing. Yes, you read that right. Your most important work comes second. Why? Because you can’t happily sustain success in your professional life if you neglect your personal “re-creation” time. Time block your time off, and then make time for your ONE Thing.
The most productive people, the ones who experience extraordinary results, design their days around doing their ONE Thing. Their most important appointment each day is with themselves, and they never miss it. If they complete their ONE Thing before their time block is done, they don’t necessarily call it a day. They use the Focusing Question to tell them how they can use the time they have left.
Similarly, if they have a specific goal for their ONE Thing, they finish it, regardless of the time. In A Geography of Time, Robert Levine points out that most people work on “clock” time—“It’s five o’clock, I’ll see you tomorrow”— while others work on “event” time— “My work is done when it’s done.” Think about it. The dairy farmer doesn’t get to knock off at any certain time; he goes home when the cows have been milked. It’s the same for any position in any profession where results matter. The most productive people work on event time. They don’t quit until their ONE Thing is done.
“Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.”
—Ambrose Bierce
The key to making this work is to block time as early in your day as you possibly can. Give yourself 30 minutes to an hour to take care of morning priorities, then move to your ONE Thing.
My recommendation is to block four hours a day. This isn’t a typo. I repeat: four hours a day. Honestly, that’s the minimum. If you can do more, then do it.
In On Writing, Stephen King describes his work flow: “My own schedule is pretty clear-cut. Mornings belong to whatever is new—the current composition. Afternoons are for naps and letters. Evenings are for reading, family, Red Sox games on TV, and any revisions that just cannot wait. Basically, mornings are my prime writing time.” Four hours a day may scare you more than King’s novels, but you can’t argue with his results. Stephen King is one of the most successful and prolific writers of our time.
Whenever I tell this story, there is always one person who says to me, “Well, sure, it’s easy for Stephen King—he’s Stephen King!” To that I simply say, “I think the question you must ask yourself is this: Does he get to do this because he is Stephen King, or is he Stephen King because he does this?” That invariably stops that discussion cold.
Like so many other successful writers, early in his career King had to find his time blocks where he could—mornings, evenings, even lunch breaks—because his day job didn’t accommodate his ambition for his life. Once extraordinary results started showing up and he could earn a living from his ONE Thing, he was able to move his time blocks to a more sustainable time.
“Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.”
—Peter Drucker
An executive assistant on our team recently transitioned to blocking large chunks of time for a project. It was stressful at first. She was continually interrupted. E-mail alerts pinged, colleagues dropped by, team members provided a steady stream of requests for her time. These weren’t even distractions—they were her job. In the end, she had to borrow a laptop and book a conference room to escape “drive-bys” and random, nonurgent requests. But within just a week, everyone became accustomed to the fact that for regular periods of time she would not be accessible. They adjusted. It took a week. Not a month or a year. A week. Meetings got rescheduled and life went on. And she experienced a huge leap in productivity.
No matter who you are, large time blocks work.
Paul Graham’s 2009 essay “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” underscores the need for large time blocks. Graham, one of the founders of the innovative venture capital firm Y Combinator, argues that normal business culture gets in the way of the very productivity it seeks because of the way people traditionally schedule their time (or are allowed to).
Graham divides all work into two buckets: maker (do or create) and manager (oversee or direct). “Maker” time requires large blocks of the clock to write code, develop ideas, generate leads, recruit people, produce products, or execute on projects and plans. This time tends to be viewed in half-day increments. “Manager time,” on the other hand, gets divided into hours. This time typically has one moving from meeting to meeting, and because those who oversee or direct tend to have power and authority, “they are in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency.” This can create a huge conflict if those needing maker time are pulled into meetings at odd hours, destroying the very time blocks they need to move themselves and the company forward. Graham embraced this insight and created a company culture at Y Combinator that now runs completely on a maker’s schedule. All meetings get clustered at the end of the day.
To experience extraordinary results, be a maker in the morning and a manager in the afternoon. Your goal is “ONE and done.” But if you don’t time block each day to do your ONE Thing, your ONE Thing won’t become a done thing.
3. TIME BLOCK YOUR PLANNING TIME
The last priority you time block is planning time. This is when you reflect on where you are and where you want to go. For annual planning, schedule this time late enough in the year that you have a sense of you
r trajectory, but not so late that you lose your running start for the next. Take a look at your someday and five-year goals and assess the progress you must make in the next year to be on track. You may even add new goals, re-envision old ones, or eliminate any that no longer reflect your purpose or priorities.
Block an hour each week to review your annual and monthly goals. First, ask what needs to happen that month for you to be on target for your annual goals. Then ask what must happen that week to be on course for your monthly goals. You’re essentially asking, “Based on where I am right now, what’s the ONE Thing I need to do this week to stay on track for my monthly goal and for my monthly goal to be on track for my annual goal?” You’re lining up the dominoes. Decide how much time you’ll need to achieve this, and reserve that amount of time on your calendar. In effect, you could say that when you time block your planning time, you’re really time blocking your time to time block. Think about it.
FIG. 30 X’s add up to extraordinary results!
In July 2007, software developer Brad Isaac shared a productivity secret he reportedly got from comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Before Seinfeld was a household name and still regularly toured, Isaac ran into him at an open-mic comedy club and asked him for advice on how to be a better comedian. Seinfeld told him the key was to write jokes (hint: his ONE Thing!) every day. And the way he’d figured out how to make that happen was to hang a huge annual calendar on the wall and then put a big red X across every day he worked on his craft. “After a few days, you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld said. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing the chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job is to not break the chain. Don’t break the chain.”
What I love about Seinfeld’s method is that it resonates with everything I know to be true. It’s simple. It’s based on doing ONE Thing, and it creates its own momentum. You could look at the calendar and be overwhelmed: “How can I commit to this for an entire year?” But the system is designed to bring your biggest goal to the now and simply focus on making the next X. As Walter Elliot said, “Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.” As you complete these short races and get a chain going, it gets easier and easier. Momentum and motivation start to take over.
There is magic in knocking down your most important domino day after day. All you have to do is avoid breaking the chain, one day at a time, until you generate a powerful new habit in your life—the time-blocking habit.
Sound simple? Time blocking is—if you protect it.
PROTECT YOUR TIME BLOCK
For time blocks to actually block time, they must be protected. Although time blocking isn’t hard, protecting the time you’ve blocked is. The world doesn’t know your purpose or priorities and isn’t responsible for them—you are. So it’s your job to protect your time blocks from all those who don’t know what matters most to you, and from yourself when you forget.
The best way to protect your time blocks is to adopt the mindset that they can’t be moved. So, when someone tries to double-book you, just say, “I’m sorry, I already have an appointment at that time,” and offer other options. If the other person is disappointed, you’re sympathetic but ultimately unmoved. Extraordinarily results-oriented people—the very people who have the most demands on their time—do this every day. They keep their most important appointment.
The toughest part is navigating a high-level request. How do you say no to anyone important—your boss, a key client, your mom—who asks you to do something with a high sense of urgency? One way is to say yes and then ask, “If I have that done by [a specific time in the future], would that work?” Most often, these requests are more about an immediate need to hand a task off than about a need for it to be done immediately, so the requester usually just wants to know it will get done. Sometimes the request is real, needs to be done now, and you must drop what you’re doing and do it. In this situation, follow the rule “If you erase, you must replace” and immediately reschedule your time block.
Then there’s you. If you’re already feeling overbooked and overworked, it can seem incredibly challenging to hold to a time block. It can be hard to imagine how everything else will get done when so much time is given to ONE Thing. The key is to fully internalize the domino fall that will happen when your ONE Thing gets done, and remember that everything else you might do or have to do will be easier or unnecessary. When I first began to time block, the most effective thing I did was to put up a sheet of paper that said, “Until My ONE Thing Is Done—Everything Else Is A Distraction!” Try it. Put it where you can see it and others can see it as well. Then make this the mantra you say to yourself and everyone else. In time, others will begin to understand how you work and support it. Just watch.
The last thing that can knock you off your time block is when you can’t free your mind. Day in and day out, your own need to do other things instead of your ONE Thing may be your biggest challenge to overcome. Life doesn’t simplify itself the moment you simplify your focus; there’s always other stuff screaming to be done. Always. So when stuff pops into your head, just write it down on a task list and get back to what you’re supposed to be doing. In other words, do a brain dump. Then put it out of sight and out of mind until its time comes.
In the end, there are plenty of ways your time block can get sabotaged. Here are four proven ways to battle distractions and keep your eye on your ONE Thing.
Build a bunker. Find somewhere to work that takes you out of the path of disruption and interruption. If you have an office, get a “Do Not Disturb” sign. If it has glass walls, install shades. If you work in a cubicle, get permission to put up a folding screen. If necessary, go elsewhere. The immortal Ernest Hemingway kept a strict writing schedule starting at seven every morning in his bedroom. The mortal but still immensely talented business author Dan Heath “bought an old laptop, deleted all its browsers, and, for good measure, deleted its wireless network drivers” and would take his “way-back machine” to a coffee shop to avoid distractions. Between the two extremes, you could just find a vacant room and simply close the door.
Store provisions. Have any supplies, materials, snacks, or beverages you need on hand and, other than for a bathroom break, avoid leaving your bunker. A simple trip to the coffee machine can derail your day should you encounter someone seeking to make you a part of theirs.
Sweep for mines. Turn off your phone, shut down your e-mail, and exit your Internet browser. Your most important work deserves 100 percent of your attention.
Enlist support. Tell those most likely to seek you out what you’re doing and when you’ll be available. It’s amazing how accommodating others are when they see the big picture and know when they can access you.
If, ultimately, you continue a tug-of-war to make time blocking take place, then use the Focusing Question to ask: What’s the ONE Thing I can do to protect my time block every day such by doing it everything else I might do will be easier or unnecessary?
BIG IDEAS
Connect the dots. Extraordinary results become possible when where you want to go is completely aligned with what you do today. Tap into your purpose and allow that clarity to dictate your priorities. With your priorities clear, the only logical course is to go to work.
Time block your ONE Thing. The best way to make your ONE Thing happen is to make regular appointments with yourself. Block time early in the day, and block big chunks of it—no less than four hours! Think of it this way: If your time blocking were on trial, would your calendar contain enough evidence to convict you?
Protect your time block at all costs. Time blocking works only when your mantra is “Nothing and no one has permission to distract me from my ONE Thing.” Unfortunately, your resolve won’t keep the world from trying, so be creative when you can be and firm when you must. Your time block is the most important meeting of your day, so whatever it takes to protect it is what you have to do.
The
people who achieve extraordinary results don’t achieve them by working more hours. They achieve them by getting more done in the hours they work.
Time blocking is one thing; productive time blocking is another.
16 THE THREE COMMITMENTS
“Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it.”
—George Halas
Achieving extraordinary results through time blocking requires three commitments. First, you must adopt the mindset of someone seeking mastery. Mastery is a commitment to becoming your best, so to achieve extraordinary results you must embrace the extraordinary effort it represents. Second, you must continually seek the very best ways of doing things. Nothing is more futile than doing your best using an approach that can’t deliver results equal to your effort. And last, you must be willing to be held accountable to doing everything you can to achieve your ONE Thing. Live these commitments and you give yourself a fighting chance to experience extraordinary
THE THREE COMMITMENTS TO YOUR ONE THING
Follow the Path of Mastery
Move from “E” to “P”
Live the Accountability Cycle
1. FOLLOW THE PATH OF MASTERY
Mastery isn’t a word we often hear anymore, but it’s as critical as ever to achieving extraordinary results. As intimidating as it might initially seem, when you can see mastery as a path you go down instead of a destination you arrive at, it starts to feel accessible and attainable. Most assume mastery is an end result, but at its core, mastery is a way of thinking, a way of acting, and a journey you experience. When what you’ve chosen to master is the right thing, then pursuing mastery of it will make everything else you do either easier or no longer necessary. That’s why what you choose to master matters.